This news item from a few weeks ago revealed that when users created a “public link” of their Claude chat history, that chat history ended up in Google’s search queries.
Aren’t these urls supposed to be more or less undiscoverable by virtue of the long string of random characters that they contain?
How did Google discover those urls?
Did these people publish the urls somewhere publically themselves?
Or did Google “fish” them out of their gmail inbox or something like that?
Yes, Anthropic presumably submitted a request to block search results that lead to Claude chats, as well as to remove the ones that were already there. Google’s removal tool can remove results that had been indexed, and the “noindex” meta tag prevents future indexing, if I’m understanding correctly.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en
My guess would be yes. I doubt the removal tool actually deletes content, more likely it just deactivates it. It could theoretically be reactived or used for something else, possibly even inbreeding (AI chat logs to train AI on) or selling data to whoever pays for it. But that is just a guess, I could be wrong. I don’t have much optimism when it comes to corporations, they tend to be as evil as they can get away with. If they legally acquired the content from those links because Anthropic neglected to protect them, there may not be many limits to what Google can do with those chat logs.
Why would AI companies respect noindex tags if they dont even care about copyright?
Yeah, they probably don’t. But public search engines typically do.
It is very, very difficult to keep anything private these days.